


gathering strays

by nighimpossible



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Codependency, First Meetings, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 22:04:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6537934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nighimpossible/pseuds/nighimpossible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young Vex meets Trinket, and Vax has a request.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gathering strays

**Author's Note:**

> I know Laura has a canon way that Vex meets Trinket, but I had an idea and really wanted to run with it! Consider this canon-divergent. No real spoilers for the show.

 

 

 

“Can you just,” Vax sighs, cupping her cheek with one gloved hand, “stay out of trouble while I’m gone for fucking once, sister?”

 

Vex scowls. “Shut up,” she huffs. “You get in much more trouble than I ever do.”

 

“Yes, but at least I’m _sneaky_ about it.” Vax pinches her cheek and lets go of her face, throwing up his hood around his head. “You’re more than capable, I know. I just—be careful. For my sake.” Vax downs the last of his drink—a drink put in his hand by an extra generous wink on Vex’s behalf, in spite their youthful appearances (thank _you,_ Mister Bartender)—and gives her a serious look. “Please.”

 

“It’ll be fine,” Vex murmurs quietly just over the rabble of the bar noise around them. She kicks him in the shin for good measure. “I distract, you sneak. We’ve done it before.”

 

Vex turns to the bar and takes a swig of her drink before spilling it over the patron next to her. “Oh my word, _excuse_ me,” she shouts loudly, leaning in and knocking over another drink rather loudly against the wooden overhang of the bar. She notes in her periphery how Vax vanishes easily from sight in the confusion of her diversion and grins to herself rather cheekily.

 

“You smiling about this?” the dwarven patron to her left asks, aggravated and sopping wet with ale. He stands up to his full height, a whopping four feet and change, but Vex spies his broadsword strapped to his back and feels wary.

 

“No! Absolutely not,” Vex soothes. “Here, let me buy you another drink. _Two_ drinks. I’m so very, very sorry.” She twirls a lock of her hair around her first finger. “I’m just such a clumsy girl.”

 

Vex, honest to Serenrae, _cannot_ remember the last time she’s knocked something over accidentally.

 

“ _So_ clumsy,” she repeats, pouting her lip and ushering over the bartender. “Two more glasses of your _finest_ ale, for this wonderful gentleman right here.”

 

Their quarry, a minor lord named Sir Darren with a large bounty on his head for betraying the city council, is staying somewhere outside the town to hide from hunters like Vex and her brother. His _wife_ , however, is having a riotous affair with the head of Darren’s guard in one of the rooms of the inn. Vax should have eyes on her soon. If they bring the traitor to the city council, the reward will be enough to feed the two of them for a month, perhaps more if they make a good impression. Vex is excellent at good impressions. Well, sometimes.

 

“Our finest ale costs fifty gold a glass,” the bartender says after a moment of confusion. “If you’ve got that kind of coin, I’ve been serving you the wrong shit all evening.”

 

Vex thinks of her purse and thins her lips. “Two glasses of your five pieces of gold-iest ale, sir.” The bartender nods and Vex generously gives him an extra wink. She likes the way he blushes so prettily when she winks at him.

 

The dwarf wipes his pants off, splashing her with the excess still dripping on the leather of his armor. “Maybe clumsy people shouldn’t be sitting at the bar. _Girl_.” He looks at her ears, hidden behind a curtain of her unbound hair, and his eyes narrow. With a preternatural quickness, he grabs her dark mane, pulling it back to reveal her pointed ears. “Your features are too coarse to be a full-elf. It’s a fuckin’ _half-breed_ , Goran!”

 

Vex hears Goran before she sees him: the footsteps of a goliath echo are unmistakable even in through the bar noise that surrounds them.

 

“Half-breed?” Goran asks from behind her.

 

Vex has one hand on her bow, but the dwarf’s face reads: _I dare you_. He’s still got her hair in his hand. “Aren’t you two a motley crew,” Vex says nervously.

 

“We work for a man who pays good coin for the heads of half-breeds,” the dwarf continues.

 

“He sounds like a dick,” Vex thinks aloud.

 

“A rich dick,” Goran agrees from behind her. “But we’ve all got to pay the bills somehow.”

 

The bartender gives her a nervous look while the dwarf drags her away from the bar. He has a knife in his hand, but Vex shakes her head at him. Instead, she mouths, “ _Get my brother_ ,” before the dwarf drags her by the hair outside the inn.

 

Once she’s outside, Vex knocks her head back against the dwarf’s face. The dwarf howls in pain, releasing her from his grip. She scrambles and turns to face them, now bow and arrow cocked at the ready.

 

“Trust me,” Vex hisses, cocking her bow with a quickness earned from years of experience with the weapon, “if I could burn my father’s blood from my veins, I _would_.” She aims at the dwarf, who seems to be the brains of the operation, and begins to back away.

 

_At least it’s not raining_ , she thinks to herself. She’s been in way worse situations, albeit with Vax at her side. Vex is a capable woman.

 

The sky above her cracks with thunder. “Motherfucker,” she says aloud as the rain begins to pour.

 

The dwarf narrows his eyes at her, spitting blood on the ground at his feet from where she’d smacked him in the mouth with her skull. “How old are you, girl?”

 

“That change anything?”

 

The dwarf shrugs. “Dunno. Probably not.”

 

Vex shifts in the dirt that is now turning muddy at her feet from the rain. “Fourteen,” she admits in a purposefully small voice, unsure if it will help her cause. These two don’t strike her as particularly sympathetic. 

 

The dwarf shrugs and unsheathes a broadsword, stepping forward. “Old enough to die, I suppose.”

 

Vex shoots an arrow into his sword arm with a quick release belied by her calm. “Don’t come any closer.” The dwarf huffs out in pain, but the goliath puts a hand on his shoulder in an _I got this_ motion that makes her very, very nervous.

 

“How are we gonna scalp you from all the way over here?” Goran tells her frankly. He raises his war hammer and the next thing she knows, she’s on her back and it’s like all the air in her chest has been forced from her body. She can’t—she can’t take a full breath—

 

The dwarf takes a swing at her, standing above her with his broadsword, essentially shooting fish in a barrel. Amazingly, she manages to dodge out of the way of his full attack, but her side gets caught by the edge of his blade. She cries out in pain as her flesh is cut even through her armor. 

 

“Vax,” she murmurs, managing to get up from the ground and starting to run from the two bounty hunters. She knows that there’s no way he could hear her from this range, but if she’s going to die, it’s going to be his name on her lips as she takes her final breath.

 

Thankfully, neither the dwarf nor Goran have great ranged attacks on her. She does hear Goran’s warhammer smash into a building right above her head, but overall, she manages to avoid any further damage during her attempted escape.

 

Spying an alleyway to her right, she darts down it and immediately knows she’s made a mistake.

 

“A dead end?” she hisses in frustration, and indeed: the alley butts up against a solid brick wall, almost fifty feet high. “Shit shit _shit_.”

 

She hides in the shadows as best she can, but the adrenaline coursing through her veins starts to fade and the pain—the _brutal_ pain of the wound on her side and what are probably more than a few broken ribs—begins to overwhelm her. Tears fall down her face, unbidden, and she wipes them away furiously. She has no time for that.

 

“ _Little half-breed_ ,” Goran calls, appearing at the mouth of the alley. His large form nearly spans the width of the entrance. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

 

Vex backs up further against the cold, wet texture of the wall until she hits something quite warm. Eyes wide, she turns to find a young brown bear lying in the garbage, his fur wet and glittering in the night. It gives her a quiet, pained look and, in a moment, Vex understands that this creature has been abandoned. She knows that look all too well.

 

She is not afraid of this beast. Perhaps her ranger skills inform her calm, or perhaps it is some other kind of unseen connection that tells her to be not afraid, but when she reaches out and pets the bear’s head, the bear nuzzles against her palm gently.

 

“How strange,” Vex smiles. The bear hums in agreement.

 

“That thing will make a great coat,” the dwarf grins from behind her. Goran, it seems, is too large to enter the alley.

 

“Touch him and die,” Vex says darkly, struggling to stand between the dwarf and the bear, but stand she does all the same. She’s not sure where this intense protectiveness is coming from, but she feels it through her whole person like a jolt of electricity. 

 

She shoots at the dwarf with one of her last arrows, and it buzzes by him with an easy dodge. In the distance, however, Goran shouts, “My fucking _eye_!” She leans around the dwarf to see Goran clutching at his face and laughs. In her brief moment of victory, however, the dwarf capitalizes on her distraction and tears her bow from her fingers.

 

“No!” Vex shouts, watching her bow bang against the wall, at least ten feet away from her. She tries to make a run for it, but the dwarf’s sword is at her throat. He flicks the blade against her cheek, drawing blood. She doesn’t flinch.

 

The bear begins to growl behind her.

 

“Okay, time to die,” he tells her simply.

 

Vex spits in his face. “My brother will find you and he will kill you.”

 

The dwarf raises an eyebrow. “There’s another half-breed?” He turns his neck back to the distant goliath, who is still clutching at his mangled eye. “That’s double the payload, Goran, you hear that?”

 

In a flash, the bear leaps forward and knocks the dwarf down, both of his great paws on the bounty hunter’s chest. “Good boy!” Vex wheezes, collapsing to her knees. “You know what to do.” And indeed, the bear does know: he gouges out the dwarf’s neck with one massive snap of his jaw, tearing out the flesh there and leaving the dwarf gasping for air with one final gurgle before he expires.

 

“Gregor, that fucking bitch hurt my eye,” Goran calls from the mouth of the alley.

 

“I wouldn’t call my sister a bitch,” a voice says from the shadows, and with three well-placed daggers and the surprise of a sneak attack, Vax has felled a goliath in one fell swoop (well, Vex helped).

 

“Come here,” Vex sighs. She’s on her back in the mud at this point, and she’s not sure who she’s calling: Vax, certainly, but the bear as well. The bear, being closer, snuggles up to Vex, bloody maw and all. The beast gives her a timid but curious lick along the skin of her face and an invisible, otherworldly thread seems to tie the two of them together in an instant.

 

“Vex,” her brother murmurs, standing a few feet from her and the bear, daggers still at the ready. “What—what is going on?”

 

The bear growls at him, eyeing the shining daggers in his hand.

 

“Did you at least get the information from Lady Darren?” Vex wheezes.

 

“That’s really what you’re going to go with right now,” Vax frowns at her.

 

“Can you put your weapons away around the poor thing, please,” Vex groans, curling herself around the bear even further and petting his fur. She turns her face away from him to hide the gore.

 

“Let me see you,” Vax requests, pocketing two of his daggers and kneeling down next to her. The bear’s growls subside slightly.

 

“I’m fine,” she sighs. He takes her face in his hand gingerly and gently, but forcefully, guides her face into the light of his flametongue dagger. “Oh, Stubby,” he sighs. “You look like shit.”

 

“I have a bear now, though,” Vex offers. Saying that the bear is hers seems both right and wrong: yes, there is a connection there now, some miraculous tether between her and this animal, but she belongs to him as much as he belongs to her. They are two abandoned things in the world drawn to each other by their great capacities for love, in spite of their circumstances. She knows, simply and suddenly, that she is forever changed.

 

“I’m seeing that,” Vax nods. He puts away the flametongue dagger and reaches out a hand toward the bear. “Hey, buddy. Thanks for saving this one.” The bear snuffles against Vax’s hand for a moment before curling back against Vex’s side. “Let’s not split up anymore, dipshit,” he nods at Vex.

 

“Okay,” she sighs, her energy dissipating as blood seeps from the wound in her side into the dirt.

 

“Alright, you need a potion and some rest.” Vax picks her up in his arms and Vex doesn’t even protest, folding herself against his chest in a moment of weakness. She doesn’t need Vax to take care of her, though it is nice to have him. “We take care of each other,” Vax replies, and Vex realizes that she’s been narrating her thoughts inadvertently. He looks back at the bear. “You coming, big guy?”

 

The bear follows them, a beastly shadow in the night.

 

Vex falls asleep in Vax’s arms, only waking up as a potion is poured into her mouth. “It’s a greater healing,” Vax tells her. “You’ll feel much better soon.”

 

“How much did that cost?” Vex groans. She feels like the flesh of her side has mostly healed up, and while there might be a few bruised ribs remaining in the morning, she’ll certainly be able to fight after a long rest.

 

“Doesn’t matter,” Vax says simply. “We’ll get gold from the Darren bounty, regardless.” He pauses, and Vax leans down to lay his head against her stomach. She lets her hand rest against his cheek.

 

“I won’t leave again, ever,” he promises. “I know where I belong.” She nods. They both know that home is not a place, but a person. “I won’t leave either of you.”

 

Vex’s eyes widen. “The bear?”

 

“Still here, in the stables downstairs. Seems to have taken a real liking to you, sister.” Vax smiles at her. “What’s that about?”

 

“What, you take things all the time!” Vex protests. “Now I’m taking something.”

 

“Yes, _things_ , Vex,” Vax reminds her. “Not great beasts.”

 

“He’s my new trinket, and he’s staying _with_ us,” Vex pouts.

 

Vax puts his hands up. “Hey, after the beating you took tonight, far be it from me to deprive you of an inevitable bear mauling.”

 

Vex raises an eyebrow. “If Trinket’s going to be mauling anyone, it’ll be you, brother.”

 

“Trinket? Really?” Vax asks.

 

“Just seeing how it rolls off the tongue,” Vex grins at him.

 

Vax gets up and sits in the chair in the corner of the room, tugging his hood down over his ears and curling up to rest. “Do me a favor, sis?” he asks her in the eerie quiet.

 

“What is it?” Vex asks edgily. She knows better than to offer anyone a blank check.

 

He can’t look her in the eye, but eventually he comes up with the words after a long, uncomfortable silence. “Don’t die before me,” he says softly. “Please. I couldn’t—living my life, without you…” His voice cuts off.

 

“Vax,” she says, aghast. He won’t look at her, simply stares out the window, his face hidden in the shadow of his cloak. She thinks about walking over and forcing him to deal with what he just requested, but she knows that if she were to pull back Vax’s hood right now, she’d find tears on his cheeks. Vex has a decent read on most people, and she knows her brother best of all. She’s kind enough, in this moment, to let him keep his dignity. 

 

“Okay,” she agrees, voice tight in her own throat. “I’ll do my best.”


End file.
